Going To The Muzei
You can turn your Android home screen into a museum of sorts with little more than an app. Muzei offers up a painting from a well-known artist every day. We're going through a spell of Vincent Van Gogh these days.
All you have to do is click to enable Muzei wallpapers and a painting will replace what you currently have. You can see an archive of past paintings but sadly can't pull those in at will. You can modify the painting a little by blurring it, but that's it.
This is a great way of getting acquainted with more art. With a swipe you can go to the WikiArt entry and check out the information on it. Another thing the Muzei app allows you to do is add more sources so you don't just have paintings. Try National Geographic, for instance.
Meerkat Is Watching
A short while ago, two video streaming apps, Periscope and Meerkat, caused quite a stir as they allowed anyone with an iPhone to become a broadcaster. Just fire up, aim, fire, and the video stream goes live. Periscope belongs to Twitter and Meerkat too was dependent on Twitter until Twitter sort of edged it out. Now, Meerkat has beaten Periscope to the Android platform and can be had for free from the Play Store.
Before you dismiss it as a frivolous pastime, consider that it could be put to very interesting use in business scenarios, from beaming live presentations to branding experiences such as a store tour, for instance. Young viewers will likely love it and engagement is almost guaranteed as curious viewers tune in to watch this addictive format.
Recording On The Screen
There are all sorts of situations when a screen recorder can be useful. There are quite a few on iOS, but here’s one for Android devices. AZ Screen Recorder is free to try but if you want all its features you “donate” Rs 186. With that, you get a clever invisible button to start and pause/resume and stop recording. You just use the top right of the screen in different patterns.
Once the recording gets started, it obviously picks up everything you do on your screen. But most useful, it records your voice at the same time (unless you disable that). Now you could easily do something on your phone and explain to someone else at the same time — later sharing the video by email or cloud. The full version gives you many more controls including the invisible button, video size and quality settings and other options.
(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 15-06-2015)
BW Reporters
Mala Bhargava has been writing on technology well before the advent of internet in Indians and before CDs made their way into computers. Mala writes on technology, social media, startups and fitness. A trained psychologist, she claims that her understanding of psychology helps her understand the human side of technology.
